… And Whether Pigs Have Wings

by Patrick Ramage

I’ve been following the WikiLeaks/Japan whaling story with amazed ambivalence since a longtime journo friend in Tokyo forwarded me the batch of newly released cables late Sunday evening. My interest in this developing story is deeper and more diverse than he might’ve guessed.

Directing IFAW’s global whale program has put me in the thick of the whaling debate for the past several years. For considerably longer than that, I have been a colleague, friend and admirer of the current U.S. representative to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Monica Medina, who together with other friends and contacts, features prominently in several of the freshly leaked documents. Even earlier in my mad careen of a career, I served for five years as a Russian and German linguist in Military Intelligence, producing classified reports myself, prompting paranoid perusers of my resume to suggest, a quarter century later, that Patrick Ramage may actually be a government plant!

The essence of the latest leaks, based on notes of meetings between U.S. and Japanese officials in Tokyo, is that the Obama Administration and others were working with Japanese officials to forge an interim agreement or deal on whaling, that the Japanese Government consistently refused to be pinned down on terms it might accept, and that the U.S. Department of State and Embassy in Tokyo were actively pressing Japan to come to the table — apparently even entertaining Japanese officials’ requests to sick the Internal Revenue Service on the U.S. chapter of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a controversial non-governmental organization apologists for the whaling industry love to hate. Certain important facts somehow escape mention in the cables — that Japan’s whaling fleet has illegally slaughtered more than 20,000 whales since the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling was passed twenty-five years ago, that over the same period, Japan has openly recruited dozens of countries to the IWC in what amounts to an unprecedented slow motion hostile takeover of an international environmental convention. And that, despite all these crazy expenditures by their government, the good people of Japan are turning up their noses, refusing to buy significant amounts of whale meat, laying down the harpoon and picking up cameras to pursue whales in a more sustainable, whale-friendly way in the 21st century.

As a full-time whale hugger and public interest advocate, I can therefore only welcome the WikiLeaks phenomenon and the sunlight it is now shining on a misguided effort to legitimize commercial whaling in the 21st century. Earlier this year, with the help of committed staff and supporters worldwide and a high profile advertising campaign in Washington and California, IFAW took a lead in helping sink this mind-numbingly dumb idea, first floated in the diplomatic discussions reported in these dispatches. Beyond that, there is not much new here. Ms. Medina and others involved in “secret” IWC negotiations over the past several years had already openly discussed most of the details of the proposed whaling “compromise” repeatedly seeking support from IFAW and other conservation groups for the “deal”. She and I have regularly matched sound bites in the media and even crossed swords in dueling testimony before House Foreign Affairs Subcommittees last June. It has been an interesting period for our friendship, at times infuriating, especially for her. ”Now Monica, we can disagree without being disagreeable.” I sometimes tease. And to her credit, even if through gritted teeth, she will regularly remind me that “we’re both just doin’ our jobs.”

Yet as a past intelligence professional, a small time practitioner of statecraft, and a persistent patriot, I do have a sneaking suspicion, as I stare back at his face on the WikiLeaks homepage, that Julian Assange — who doesn’t look so well — is on a one-man mission, that the job he is tryin’ to do on us is about something other than saving whales or even promoting transparency in government, and that he really doesn’t much like us — as in U.S. And I wonder whether hardworking public servants singed by Assange and his Wikileaks will actually be inspired to commit to some higher level of integrity and transparency going forward, or simply a lower level of communication.

Our thanks to the International Fund for Animal Welfare and IFAWAnimalWire (formerly IFAW’s Animal Rescue Blog) for permission to republish this post, which appeared on their site on Jan. 4, 2011.

Patrick Ramage is IFAW’s Global Whale Program Director. A frequently quoted conservation advocate, he speaks regularly before media, government, corporate and university audiences, and has testified before the United States House Foreign Affairs and Natural Resources Committees. In addition to leading IFAW delegations to more than a dozen meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) Patrick has served as an accredited representative to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the U.N. Conference on Population and Development, the World Trade Organization and the Arctic Council.

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